Distinctions among concepts and approaches to assessing social support are made, and
published generic and specialized measures of social support are reviewed. Depending on …

Social support literature has been criticized for lacking methodological clarity. The purpose
of this study was to conduct a systematic descriptive review of the social support literature …

Beginning in the early 1980s, many researchers started to conceptualize support not as a
unitary concept but rather as a mixture of several different concepts. The social support …

Definitions and concepts of social support are reviewed in an attempt to develop a
theoretical structure for future research. Fourteen techniques for measuring social support …

To obtain a clearer picture of what constitutes social support, we conducted three studies to
compare measures of different conceptions of social support. Relations of these instruments …

This chapter is intended to serve several purposes. We begin by reviewing the concept of
social support and its implications for assessment, an activity that has preoccupied social …

Social support research has suffered from a constricted range of methodological
approaches and poorly developed theory. A more theory-driven approach would not only be …

Although the social support literature is growing rapidly, this field of inquiry like so many
others is marked by fuzziness, a multitude of definitions of its major variables, and a lack of …

This article reviews the development of a program of research on social support. It began
with the construction of an instrument to assess overall support and determination of its …

The growth of research on social support has led to a comparable proliferation in the ways it
is conceptualized and operationalized. The overall purpose of the present paper was to …